Day of the Storm God
by BobH2
Summary: Featuring Arthur Dales, a mysterious puzzle box, and ancient gods, as a madman's quest for power takes Mulder and Scully back to 1945 and the dying days of the Third Reich, with the fate of the world itself at stake.
1. Chapter 1

BERLIN,  
>APRIL 30TH, 1945.<p>

From his position behind one of the piles of rubble that vied with the fires and bomb craters to be this battered city's most ubiquitous feature, the man in the shadows watched his prey through narrowed eyes. To those who could read such things, his uniform identified him as an SS Sturmbannfuehrer. To those who could read a man's soul, those eyes marked him as a ruthless killer.

These were the last, dying hours of the Third Reich. Berlin was ringed by Soviet troops, the Red Army closing in and tightening the noose as they fought their way ever closer to the Reich Chancellery and to the ultimate prize, the capture of Adolf Hitler himself. It was one of these advancing soldiers who was the focus of the Sturmbannfuehrer's interest. Battling their way in from the north, this arm of the Red Army advance had swept aside the Volksturm units that opposed them, penetrating west of Berlin and moving into the streets between the Bismarckstrasse and the Kantstrasse. Fighting between the Red Army and the city's defenders, under the overall command of the city commandant General Weidling, was now being conducted house-to-house in that warren of small streets. Every inch of ground was being bought at tremendous cost in blood despite those defenders often being the boys and old men that were all the Reich could now muster. It was in the nature of such combat that individual soldiers often got separated from their comrades, and unfortunate for one such soldier that he was now in reach of the man in the shadows.

Since being drafted in the dark days of 1942, Alexei Denisovitch had fought bravely first in defence of the rodina and then as part of the avenging force rolling back the fascist imperialist aggressor. He hadn't expected to live as long as this, but now that he had, now it was obvious the time left to the Third Reich could be measured in hours, he was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, he would live to once again see his family's small farm in Georgia. The man in the shadows reaching out from his place of concealment and violently twisting Alexei's head around ended that dream with a single loud crack.

To Sturmbannfuehrer Heinrich Krueger, Alexei Denisovitch's death was just one more in a long line. He felt nothing. Moving swiftly and efficiently, Krueger stripped him of his Red Army uniform, stuffing this into a backpack he had brought along for that purpose. Swinging the backpack over his shoulder and carrying his victim's rifle and helmet, Krueger headed for the relative safety of the area around the Chancellery still controlled by Berlin's defenders, leaving Denisovitch to the rats.

He had travelled only a short distance, when a sound from a bombed out building he was passing caused him to wheel about, rifle at the ready.

"Don't shoot!" said a female voice, "Please!"

She was blonde, blue-eyed, and beautiful, like something from a propaganda poster touting Aryan perfection, but now as dirty and dishevelled as everyone else fighting to protect this ruined city. Clad in the uniform of a blitz madchen, she looked awfully young.

"Who are you?" demanded Kreuger. "Why are you here?"

"My name is Eva Schreiber," she said, voice trembling. "My friends and I were caught out in the open during the last round of shelling, so we sought shelter in this building. They were killed, and I've only just dug myself out."

"Congratulations," said Kreuger, lowering his rifle and resuming his journey.

"Wait!" she cried, scrambling after him. "Take me with you."

He stared at her coldly.

"Accompany me if you must, but I won't be responsible for your safety. I won't take that responsibility for anyone, not anymore."

Eva nodded wordlessly, and fell in beside him. They had gone only a few yards more when Kreuger stopped abruptly.

"What is it?" asked Eva, but he shook his head, listening intensely.

Krueger had been in combat situations many more times than he could remember and had long since developed the instincts that could mean the difference between living or dying on the battlefield. It was these that made him suddenly freeze in his tracks half way along the Charlottenburger Chausee. He didn't know what was wrong, he just knew that something was. Crouching down, sniffing the air, he tried to get a fix on what had set alarms ringing in his head. He was in no immediate danger from the Red Army; from the gunfire exchanges he could hear they were still several streets away. They had temporarily stopped shelling the area since they could no longer do so without killing their own troops, and there were no tanks nearby. He had had to leap for cover during his outward trip when a Russian fighter strafed the road he was using, but there were no airplanes overhead at the moment. So what was it?

One moment he was wondering this then, without warning, he and Eva were both falling forward. They were unconscious before they hit the ground.


	2. Chapter 2

FBI HEADQUARTERS  
>WASHINGTON, DC.<p>

"She asked for me specifically?" said Mulder, in some surprise.

"How does a high powered political hostess like Susan Maddow even know his name?" asked Dana Scully.

"I have no idea Agent Scully," said Deputy Director Walter Skinner, "but when someone with that much juice asks us for something we don't say 'no'."

Agent Fox Mulder grimaced at that. Despite all his many years with the Bureau he still held on to the naive belief that everyone should have equal access to the law and that those with power and influence should not be treated differently than anyone else. He knew this was not how the world worked, of course, but he still thought it should be. So he was not as positively disposed towards Mrs Maddow as he might have been when the Deputy Director ushered them into the interview room where she awaited them.

"Ah, you must be Fox Mulder," she said, holding out a hand, "I've heard a lot about you."

"Not all of it bad, I hope," he said, shaking her hand. She gave him a thin smile.

"This is my partner, Dana Scully," he said, introducing her.

"Ah yes, of course," she said, looking Scully up and down with what struck Mulder as an unusual degree of interest.

Susan Maddow carried herself with the same confidence Mulder had seen in the very wealthy on more than one occasion. Her hair and make-up were immaculate, her designer clothing understated and elegant, and she looked to be in her early-sixties, though he knew she had to be around seventy.

"So how can we help you?" asked Skinner.

"_You_ can't help me at all," she said, distainfully, "but if you'll give us some privacy I have business to discuss with Agents Mulder and Scully."

"Ah, yes, of course," said Skinner, backing towards the door and licking his lips. "Then I'll leave you to it."

"I've never seen him that flustered before," chuckled Mulder. "I guess you really do have juice."

"More than you can imagine, young man, but that's not what I'm here to talk about."

"Sorry. So what is it you want from us?"

"Three years ago you visited Berlin, Agent Mulder. I'd like you to tell me about that visit. Leave out nothing."

"There's nothing to leave out because nothing happened," said Mulder, puzzled by her interest. "I was on vacation and had a twenty four hour stopover there, but it was entirely uneventful."

"Let me be the judge of that. Proceed, please."

"Well, OK. It was November 9th, 1992, and I had stayed overnight at the Berlin Hilton. The hotel is on Mohrenstrasse and faces the Gendarmenmakt, one of the most beautiful squares in Europe. Since it was an unseasonably mild and sunny day, I decided to breakfast at one of the small cafes on the square. Over coffee and pastries, I mulled over what to do with the day before me. While I pondered my options, I flicked through the copies of 'Die Zeit' and 'Stern' the waiter had brought along with my breakfast, reading a few short pieces in the former before picking up the latter. 'Stern' is a glossy magazine with high production values and among the items in this issue was a set of recently discovered photographs taken by Artur Axmann, the leader of the Hitler Youth - or Reichsjugendfuehrer to give him his formal title - in the final days of the Reich. On the second page of photographs was one showing several of those present in the bunker after Hitler's death - Bormann, Burgdorf, Mohnke, Guensche, Linge, Kempka, Stumpfegger, and two others, a man and a woman both captioned as 'unknown'."

"What is it, Agent Mulder?" said Susan Maddow, studying his face intently. "Something about the photo made you uneasy, yes?"

"Yes," he admitted, "something did. I'd never seen those 'unknowns' before but I had the strangest feeling I knew them, and a strong feeling of deja vu from the photo itself."

"What did you do next?"

"I went for a walk. The wall had come down three years ago that very day, but even then much of Berlin was a building site looked over by a forest of tower cranes. The Reich Chancellery had long since gone, but beneath the ground where it once stood, Hitler's bunker still existed. The Russians had closed off the exits and the air vents with explosives in late 1946, but they hadn't destroyed it. That ground had remained a wasteland during the twenty eight years of the Berlin Wall. Now it was accessible, but soon some developer would build on it. Before that happened I needed to find...something. Reaching the site, standing on that rough earth, I was suddenly confused. What was I doing there? What had I hoped to find? Why had seeing that photograph in 'Stern' made me rush over to that place? And was my being there on that day of all days, a day of such significance in German history, a coincidence or was it something more? November 9th wasn't only the day the Wall came down. Among other things, it was also the day of Kristallnacht and the day when the Kaiser abdicated. Its historic significance gave the day a powerful symbolic resonance."

"What did you do next?"

"Not much. I wandered around for a bit, then returned to the Hilton. Like I said, nothing happened."

"On the contrary. That you felt compelled to go there after seeing that photo confirms you're the man I'm looking for, Mr Mulder."

She pulled a crumpled magazine cutting from her purse and threw it down on the desk in front of them.

It was the photo from 'Stern'. Scully gasped when she saw it.

"Ah, so you _are_ the one," said Susan Maddow, sighing with relief. "I thought you must be, but I wasn't sure. What you just felt, that shock of recognition and a powerful sense of deja vu, I also felt the first time I saw that photo. And I know why."

"Are you going to share that information with us?" asked Scully, unsettled by her reaction to the photo.

"Come and see me at my house tomorrow morning before noon," she said, handing them the case she had brought with her, "and whatever happens, don't be late. In the meantime, you'll want to check out the file in this attache case. It's not one of your X-files, but I'm sure you'll find it most interesting. It's an X-file from before there were X-files."

"You know about the X-files?" said Mulder.

"Of course I do," she sighed. "Do try to keep up, Agent Mulder. Until tomorrow."

And with that she turned on her heel and left. A few seconds later, Walter Skinner returned.

"I don't know what that was all about, and at this point I don't want to know, but you're both to drop everything else you're working on and give this matter your full attention. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," said Mulder, eyes widening in surprise. "I guess Mrs Maddow really can pull some strings."

"Like you would not believe, Agent Mulder, like you would not believe. Being the wife of a war hero and the mother of a Supreme Court justice doesn't hurt, either."

Back in their office, Mulder opened the case. Inside was a reel of Silvertone Recording Wire and an old cardboard folder which had been stamped OSS: TOP SECRET along with the date '5th June 1948'. Which was strange. President Truman had disbanded the OSS in September 1945. Even more intriguing was the name written in the top right corner: Arthur Dales.


	3. Chapter 3

BERLIN,  
>MAY 1947.<p>

"My name is Arthur Dales, and at the time of these events I was twenty-six years old. This recording is my account in my own words of the events that led to me being invalided out of the group.

It had been the coldest winter anyone could remember, the worst for a century, but now spring was here at last and it was time for me to step up my activities. After my army unit's entry into Berlin in 1945 and our encounter with a Nazi magician - see my previous interview - I was recruited by a section of the OSS that was essentially a black ops version of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section. Where the MPAA were charged with finding and protecting fine art and cultural artefacts, our job was to secure more dangerous items, things the powers that be had long known of but whose existence was kept from the general public. Because I spoke fluent German, I was able to go undercover. When President Truman officially dissolved the OSS in September 1945, our section continued operating as if nothing had changed. Well, one thing had. Instead of the Office of Strategic Services, we now called ourselves the Occult Security Service.

In 1947, using the name Hulmut Schmitt, I was passing myself off as a Grossscheiber, also and less respectfully known as a Sussstoffgangster, a 'big-time operator' in the black market. Anywhere else my criminal activities would have earned me opprobrium, but in Berlin in 1947 the black market *was* the German economy, virtually the only means of survival for a people condemned to starvation rations and lack of fuel, clothing, and medicines, so I was accorded respect by almost everyone.

I was running a large illegal operation dealing in things such as medicines, industrial chemicals, stolen art and antiquities, and precious stones as well as more basic and - to the average German - more vital commodities such as food and tobacco. My main base, and the warehouse for much of my 'stock', was a bombed-out factory in the British-controlled sector of Berlin, one that had been stripped of all its machinery by the Russians in the orgy of looting that had followed their capture of the city two years earlier.

On the day it happened, I was in the factory when the main doors were thrown open and a pair of trucks came screeching in. A grinning figure in a US Army uniform leapt out of the cabin of the lead truck and ordered his men to get the doors closed quickly.

"The heist went perfectly," said Heinrich Kreuger, my chief lieutenant, sauntering over. "Two trucks laden with Lucky Strikes and Camels, apparently held up by members of the US occupation force. With the shoot-out a while back between British and American soldiers over that train, no-one will have any difficulty believing we were real soldiers looking to make a fast buck."

"Good," I replied, "Those cigarettes will let us keep the small fry paid off and happy for a couple of months."

With the official currency all but worthless, cigarettes had taken its place as the basic unit of exchange in the barter economy that then held sway in Germany,

"Any more on that other business?" I asked.

"No, but the men are still saying it's a nosferatu - a vampire," said Kreuger. "I've told them there's no such thing, that nosferatu are superstitious nonsense, but they want to know what else could have torn out the throats of two of our lookouts without being seen. I'm not sure what to tell them, Helmut."

The OSS had ordered Kreuger and me to set up the operation we now found ourselves running. Like us, they had known what was coming, what had played out hundreds of times before. Within hours of the occupying forces arriving there would be widespread looting, first by the natives themselves and then by the troops. Museums, libraries, private homes - nowhere would be immune. The choicer items would inevitably find their way into the hands of the occupying forces. This was all utterly predictable. The first and oldest rule of war: to the victor the spoils.

Much of this booty would be shipped back home by the military. Soldiers at every level, from privates to generals, would get involved. Some items, however, would be traded locally. Rare and ancient items of great value in more civilised days would be traded for the necessities of life or for quick money. Some of those items, unbeknownst to their sellers, would have mystic powers. With the way the Nazis had scoured Europe for such things, it was inevitable some would find their way onto the black market. The OSS had a great interest in securing such items and Berlin, a city with its four sectors controlled by different occupying powers, was the obvious place for them to be traded. The organisation Kreuger and I had built up had us perfectly positioned to acquire any that found their way on to the market. In fact we were expecting to get our hands on what looked to be a very promising find within the hour.

"We've got more to worry about at the moment than vampires," I said, at length. "You're sure the Armenian has the package in question?"

"As sure as I can be," said Kreuger. "I first noticed him sizing me up at the big open air black market in Bulmke. You really ought to come along one day, Helmut. It's an amazing sight. The biggest one in all of Germany. A man can pick up almost anything he could want. Anyway, when I spotted him lurking around when I was at the Tiergarten and the Alexanderplatz on black market days, I figured he wanted something. Got a couple of the boys to 'invite' him over for a little chat. Said he had a line on a jewelled mace alleged to have magical powers looted from some schloss or other in Bavaria and he'd heard we were interested in that sort of thing."

"OK then. Get the cigarettes unloaded and we'll wait for him to show. In the meantime, let's eat."

I tossed Kreuger a can of 'bully beef', corned beef bartered from a British army NAAFI unit, and grabbed one for myself. I stabbed the top of the can with the bayonet I kept in my boot and prised it open, spooning the meat into my mouth with the blade while I watched our henchmen unload the trucks. It wasn't cordon bleu, but it was good enough for us. We were both used to foraging for whatever we could find, eating or sleeping whenever a lull in the fighting presented itself. Compared to many of the situations I'd eaten in over the past three years, and what I'd been forced to consume, this was almost luxury. I watched Kreuger as we ate, still not fully at ease with this blond, blue-eyed 'ex'-Nazi. Kreuger had been a Sturmbannfuhrer in the SS and, like others of his kind, recruited by our side at the end of the war. Two years ago I'd been doing my darndest to kill people like him; now I was supposed to work alongside him. It wasn't easy.

"Did I ever tell you about the weird thing that happened here in the dying days of the war?" he said, as we ate.

"You've told me very little of what you did back then," I said.

"True enough," he acknowledged, "but given the nature of the things we're tasked with looking out for, you'll be interested in this. It was April 30th, 1945, and the Red Army had Berlin entirely encircled. Not a good time to be here. I'd landed at Templehof, a few days earlier. I'd been with that madwoman Hanna Reitsch, and she had flown us in through heavy anti-aircraft fire from the Russians besieging the city. Gods, what a pilot that woman was, one of the best I've ever seen! She had the same swagger and lust for life, the same risk-loving personality as any male fighter ace. For a time, a very brief time, we were lovers. I wonder what she would think if she could see me now? She was there to fly Hitler out, but he was too far gone and refused to leave. Anyway, what with one thing and another, I got stranded there when she left and had to make my own plans for getting out of the city. I remember killing a Russian soldier for his uniform, to give me the escape route I was certain I'd soon need, and I recall heading for the Reichs Chancellery along the Charlottenburger Chausee with this cute little blitz madchen...then I was in a cellar, with no memory of how I got there and no sign of the cutie. I figured I'd blacked out, suffered some kind of brief memory loss as a result of being on the edge of an explosion, or something similar. It was a plausible explanation given the times, and I gave the matter no more thought, though I did wonder what had happened to the girl. Peering out through the cellar window at the boots of Red Army soldiers as they rushed by on the street outside, I knew it was time to go. I quickly threw on my Russian uniform, hefted my rifle, and joined them in the final assault on the Chancellery."

"You'd have been shot as a spy if they found you out."

"I'd have been shot out of hand anyway if they had captured me in an SS uniform, so it was worth the risk, particularly as I speak flawless Russian. Afterwards, talking to other soldiers, I found they had all experienced a 'lost' hour they had no memory of, one that overlapped the period of my blackout. Later still, I discovered that as far as those outside Berlin were concerned an impenetrable fog had descended over the city during that hour with no one able to get in or out and there being total radio silence."

"How come this is the first I'm hearing of this?"

"The Russians were convinced it was a German super-weapon, one they were desperate to get their hands on, and they managed to keep any word of it from reaching the ears of the Western Allies."

"Any idea what happened in Berlin during that hour?"

"No, but _something_ must have. A city under siege lost a whole hour, and no one knows why."

We continued eating in silence after that, lost in thought, and were just finishing our repast when someone rapped on the door. It was the Armenian. Tossing the empty bully beef can onto a rusting pile of its discarded twins, I wiped my bayonet clean, slipped it back into my boot, and went over to let him in.

Krekor Ourganian was a tall, sallow-skinned fellow with a large and imposing nose. In more prosperous times he would have stood broad and erect, but in these straitened days he looked as stooped and undernourished as all too many others in this tired and defeated country. I wondered what his story was, but not enough to ask. Under his arm, clutched tightly to his side, was a paper parcel, tied with twine.

"Is that it?" I said, without preamble. Neither of us had time for the niceties.

"Yes," said the Armenian, glancing nervously at the dozen or so men I had in the warehouse.

"Let me see it," I said, holding my hand out. He passed the package to me and I tore off the wrapping.

The mace was everything he had said it was. Heavy, and encrusted with precious stones, there were words in some language I did not recognize, cast into the gold it was made from.

"Nice workmanship," said Kreuger, coming over, "but I don't recognize the period."

Neither did I, but I got the sense the mace was incredibly old, that its age was measured not in centuries but in millennia.

"Ekri fumin thalasu," came a strong, sepulchral voice from somewhere overhead, its words bouncing around the hollow interior of the factory. I dropped the mace and whipped out my mauser, even as Kreuger and our men were pulling out their own guns, all of us aiming them upwards, peering into the darkness of the roof trusses, high above such illumination as our oil lamps provided.

"Artki ekrus Maladon," came the voice again, and we all squeezed the triggers of our pistols, almost simultaneously. Not one of them would fire.

"A powerful artifact, the Mace of Maladon," said the voice, its tone darkly amused, causing me to notice one of the jewels embedded in the mace was now glowing brightly. "Stopping fire from igniting is but one of its abilities, and why it must again belong to me."

Then it was among us.

Diving down out of the shadows, bat-wings extended, came something out of a nightmare. Talons slashing, fangs tearing into flesh, it had eviscerated four of my gang before any of them had time to react. Like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck, the men stood there, paralysed by shock. Not so Kreuger and I. Even as it tore Krekor Ourganian's head from his body, I was pulling the pins from a couple of grenades and pitching them among the oil drums holding the fuel for our trucks, figuring the damping field created by the mace would prevent them from exploding. I pocketed the pins, hoping I would need them again but fearing I would not. Kreuger meanwhile had grabbed a sword, a beautiful blade a Prussian officer had bartered for food, and was slashing at the creature. The flashing blade was keeping the demon at bay, but not for long. Even as I ran to aid Kreuger, it knocked the sword from his hand with the sweep of a wing and was on him, fangs sinking into his neck as a taloned hand plunged into Kreuger's gut, ripping out coils of intestine.

Running at the monster from behind, I leapt onto a crate and launched myself at him, burying my bayonet between his wings, deep in the muscles of his back. He reared up, roaring in anger and in pain, monstrous wings beating the air and sending him soaring up towards the roof with me hanging one-handed from the bayonet embedded in his back. He tried to shake me off, but I flicked the wrist of my free hand, activating the spring-loaded sheath strapped beneath my sleeve and shooting a long, thin stiletto out into my waiting grasp. I thrust this blade into his side with all my strength, but not with enough speed to prevent him from grabbing my arm. He cracked it like a whip, and I howled in agony as it snapped in several places above the elbow. He had me now, easily dislodging me from the bayonet and throwing me to the ground with all his formidable strength. I hurtled fifty feet, only the crates of cigarettes I crashed onto saving me from being badly hurt.

The creature alighted almost casually, folding his wings up behind him and pulling out the two blades I had sunk into him. He licked the blood off each then dropped them, slowly turning his head to survey the blood- drenched scene of carnage before him. Except for the Armenian, everyone else was still miraculously alive, though all had been immobilized and were dying. I realized it wasn't a miracle when he began to feast. It had been deliberate. The creature liked his food still kicking.

'Nosferatu' my men had called him, but this was no simple vampire of legend and he did more than just leave teeth marks on the neck. As much cannibal as vampire, he tore great gobbets of flesh from his victims, rending their bodies with his bloody maw.

When he had dispatched our henchmen, he turned his attention to Kreuger and I, like a gourmet deliberately saving the best for last. Kreuger lay unconscious where he had fallen during my attack on the creature. Lifting Kreuger's head now, he plunged his fangs deep into his neck. Kreuger's life began ebbing away to the rhythmic sound of the creature sucking him dry. I saw the life leave him, watched Kreuger die. I staggered to my feet, my shattered arm hanging loosely at my side.

Dropping Kreuger's lifeless body to the floor, he turned to face me, slowly pacing across the thirty or so feet that separated us, moving like some great cat closing on its crippled prey.

"And so to the wolf," he snarled. "The first wolf I met on this world was the Spartan. When I fell from the stars all those years ago, I thought I had fallen among sheep. He taught me otherwise."

Barely able to move, I watched him scoop up the Mace of Maladon from where it lay some ten feet away from me.

"Thalasu ekri," he said, and the jewel on the mace that had been glowing ceased to do so.

He started closing the distance between us, but it didn't matter. I was standing in front of a window and he wasn't. It was four seconds since he had cancelled the damping field the mace was generating. The grenades had five second fuses.

There was a thunderous explosion as the grenades detonated amid the fuel drums, filling the whole warehouse with an enormous fireball. I was lifted off my feet and blown through the window, landing hard on the road outside, some thirty feet away. Concrete is a lot less forgiving than crates of cigarettes, and I felt more bones break. The pain was so intense that I blacked out.

I came to in a military hospital several days later, and eventually learned what had happened at the factory. The meagre resources the Berlin fire brigade were able to bring to the task were woefully inadequate and the blaze was left to burn itself out. Some eyewitnesses talked of seeing what looked like Satan himself fly out of the flames, his body ablaze as he described a fiery arc across the night sky before crashing to the ground. His body was totally consumed, leaving nothing but ash. Sadly, this was also the fate of almost everything in the factory."

That was where the wire recording abruptly ended. Mulder switched off his wire recorder, an old model from 1953 he kept in his office, and turned his attention to the other items that had been in the file with the recording, notably the photo he had been staring at while listening to the wire. It was a headshot of Heinrich Kreuger, and Mulder recognized him. He was the unknown male in the 'Stern' photo.


	4. Chapter 4

THE MADDOW MANSION,  
>MARYLAND.<p>

"So you think this is going to be about the missing hour?" said Scully.

"That seems likely," said Mulder, glancing across at her, "since the creature in the report was completely destroyed."

"World War Two," said Scully, rubbing her temples, "why did it have to be World War Two? I still remember in high school when they first showed us films from the concentration camps. I had nightmares about them for weeks afterwards; I still do, occasionally."

"Those are tough to watch," agreed Mulder, turning his car through the gate and onto the long road leading up to the Maddow mansion, "but everyone should see them. At least then there's some hope it'll never happen again."

"Maybe," said Scully. She did not sound hopeful.

"This place is impressive," she said, changing the subject.

"Yeah, it's home to the entire Maddow clan. Susan Maddow, her son Justice Robert Maddow and his wife, her grandson Russell Stanton and, before their deaths, Russell's parents Roger and Janet Stanton. Janet was Susan's daughter, so Justice Maddow and his wife raised Russell as if he was their own."

At the mansion's entrance they were met by a flunky who took the keys and drove the car elsewhere to be parked, and by Susan Maddow herself.

"Come on through," she said, leading them across the large expanse of the mansion's entrance hall, her heels tapping out a staccato beat on the marble floor.

The room she took them to had a number of deeply upholstered sofas and armchairs arrayed around a marble-topped coffee table. Susan took one of the armchairs and motioned for them to sit. No sooner had they done so than two young women in maid uniforms arrived, one bearing a tray on which was a teapot and several cups and saucers, and the other a large plate of cream cakes.

"I discovered the tradition of afternoon tea when my husband and I first stayed at the Dorchester in London in the fifties," said Susan, pouring our teas, "and I've had a soft spot for it ever since."

Scully showed restraint and just accepted a tea, but Mulder dove right in.

"Wow, these are really good cream cakes!" he said, enthusiastically.

"You'll have to excuse my partner," said Scully, frowning.

"Nonsense, Agent Scully, that's what they're there for and I've always appreciated a man with an appetite."

"So I'm guessing you used to be with the OSS," said Mulder, unaware of the cream on his nose.

"Correct. I was recruited in late 1945 and was with them until they were finally disbanded for good."

"When was that?"

"Shortly before the start of the Korean war. By that point we'd pretty much finished our mopping up operation in Europe and secured all the dangerous items we were likely to find so we were no longer needed."

"Why was it so important we get here before noon?" asked Scully.

"Because if you're going to save the world, you have until noon to do so."

"As ominous lines go that's right up there," said Mulder. "You have our undivided attention."

"Good, then follow me."

She led them to an upstairs bedroom where a slightly-built young man lay on a bed, a saline drip feeding into his arm and a bandage around his wrist.

"My grandson, Russell," said Susan.

Scully examined him.

"Pulse is steady, breathing normal, and no sign of any injury beyond the bandaged wrist. What's wrong with him?"

"Physically? Nothing. But his mind is missing. I believe it's currently back in 1945, in Berlin, inhabiting someone else's body."

"That's quite a claim," said Scully, sounding unconvinced.

"Why do you think that?" asked Mulder.

By way of reply she led them into the bedroom next door.

"This is Russell's study," she said.

The room was full of Nazi regalia, the walls draped in Nazi flags.

"Oh my," said Scully, her eyes wide.

"My grandson was a collector of Nazi memorabilia," said Susan, "an expensive hobby, but not an unusual one. He was also interested in the occult. I know I shouldn't have but he was my grandson, so I told him about my own experiences with the OSS and how we were convinced that one of Hitler's inner circle was a powerful sorcerer. Whoever it was had covered his tracks well, but not well enough that we couldn't infer his existence. Russell was particularly fascinated by Berlin's missing hour and he spent years researching it. He discovered something we hadn't known. During that hour, all around the world, those who were genuine mystics as opposed to frauds started drawing the same runic symbol over and over, for page after page."

"Automatic writing," said Mulder.

"Pretty much. Nor was the rune one anybody had ever encountered before that event. Russell recognized it immediately."

She walked over to a table on which lay a large box. It was made of brightly painted lacquered wood, with an ornate, runic symbol incorporated in the design on its top surface.

"I'm guessing that's the rune," said Mulder.

"Where did the box come from?" asked Scully.

"It was retrieved from that burned out factory in Berlin in 1947. We should have turned it in to the OSS, but my husband and I decided to keep it for ourselves. I couldn't tell you why - it was very unlike us. It's been on display in the house ever since, so Russell had seen it many times. His researches convinced him that the box was a key, a way of unlocking what happened during the lost hour."

"How could it be a key? I don't understand," said Scully.

"It's a puzzle box," said Susan.

"A puzzle box? But it's the size of a loaf of bread! I thought Chinese puzzle boxes were usually smaller than that."

"That's the thing. Despite its appearance, it's not Chinese. At least, we don't think it is. The rune on its surface is Norse."

"Do you know where did the box come from originally?" asked Mulder.

"We're not entirely sure. Everything that might point to its provenance went up in flames, unfortunately."

"And Russell somehow used the box to send his mind back to 1945?"

"Yes. What I didn't realise, what he kept from me until it was too late, was that he had become a Nazi himself, that he believed in their deranged worldview and that history had taken a wrong turn with their defeat. He wanted to change history and reverse that defeat."

"Assuming what you're suggesting is even possible, wouldn't we have already have felt any effects of his tampering by now if he was successful?" asked Scully.

"That's why I needed you here before noon. Russell boasted that from the time he departed to the effect of any change rippling through to the present would be forty eight hours. Time's up at noon."

Mulder hefted the box thoughtfully, as if trying to gauge something from its weight.

"I've cracked a couple of these in the past," he said, "but I've never tackled one this big before."

"Are you sure you should?" said Scully.

"Hey, we're here to save the world, remember?"

"Go ahead," said Susan Maddow. "No one who's attempted to open it before has ever succeeded other than Russell. If you can't open it we're all in trouble."

"Hmmm, plenty of the usual sliding panels and...hello. That's interesting; the middle section rotates like a Rubik's cube. And this has been in a fire?"

"Yes."

"If so, that's amazing," said Scully. "The lacquer is shiny and uncracked, the colors still vibrant; it looks like it could've been made yesterday."

"I think I'm getting somewhere with it," said Mulder, excitedly.

He had been sliding panels, spinning sections, and switching rods from one hole to another as they emerged.

"So quickly?" said Susan, surprised.

"Yeah, but I think it's designed so it requires two pairs of hands to complete the final stage. Scully, I need you to place your hands where I show you and to press those features simultaneously on the count of three."

She did as Mulder asked, taking up position on the opposite side of the box.

"Right, ready? OK, one...two...three!"

Mulder pressed down, and felt an immediate shooting pain as something stabbed him in the left wrist.

"Ow, what the heck!" he yelped, as Scully emitted a similar cry of pain.

Sharp, spring-loaded rods had sprung from the box as they pressed down, puncturing their wrists before shooting back inside.

"Are you all alright?" said Susan.

"Apart from the pain of being stabbed like that, I think so," replied Mulder. "What was that?"

"They were coated with something," said Scully, sniffing her wrist. "What have we been injected with?"

"The same substance as my grandson," said Susan. "It will take you back there, back to 1945. You have to stop him, and to save him if you can."

Mulder was starting to feel woozy.

"What...what about...language? Don't...speak German."

"No, but your host bodies will. Good luck agents, and Godspeed!"

Mulder saw Scully crumple to the floor, unconscious. A few seconds later he joined her.


	5. Chapter 5

BERLIN,  
>APRIL 30TH, 1945.<p>

Mulder experienced a period of disorientation and vertigo before feeling returned and he realised he was lying on the ground. As his vision cleared, he saw he was now somewhere else. This was Berlin, but from the devastation all around, the smells, the fires, and the sound of battle in the distance, this had to be near the end of World War II. Mulder got to his feet. He wasn't certain, but it looked like he could be on the Charlottenburger Chausee. There was a woman slumped unconscious nearby, the unknown woman from the photo. She was slowly stirring, opening her eyes and staring around groggily.

"Scully?"

Her eyes went wide at the sight of him, and she scrambled backwards.

"Stay back!" she said.

"It's me, Scully. It's Mulder."

"Mulder? It can't be!"

Then she looked down at herself and gasped. Slowly, she ran her hands over her face and body.

"This...this isn't my body."

"And this isn't mine," said Mulder, offering her his hand.

After a moment's hesitation, she took it and he helped her to her feet. She stared around her in shock.

"We're really in Berlin in 1945?" she said.

"If we're not, it's an astonishing recreation," said Mulder.

"I didn't believe it was possible. I'm still not sure I do. Could this be some sort of shared hallucination?"

"Pretty impressive one if it is. I think we have to proceed on the assumption this is all real. It's safer that way."

Scully stared at her hands again for a few seconds then searched through the pockets of her jacket.

"Aha!" she said, finding what she was looking for.

"What is it?"

"A steel mirror. Even during wartime a woman is going to have some way of checking her appearance."

She studied her reflection critically.

"She's pretty," she said, "but what's this uniform I'm wearing?"

"Blitz madchen," said Mulder.

"Blitz madchen?"

"Young women who performed support functions for the Luftwaffe. They passed along aircraft reports, operated radio equipment, and the like. As likely to be just girls looking for some excitement as actual Nazis. Which you can't say about my guy. Heinrich Kreuger was SS, so he was a true believer."

"Eva Schreiber."

"Excuse me?"

"Her name is Eva Schreiber," said Scully, examining an ID card she had fished out of another pocket.

"Right, well we need to be going," said Mulder. "We know Kreuger was headed for the Reich Chancellery, so that has to be our destination. It sounds as if the fighting is only a couple of streets over, and we daren't get caught up in it."

They set off as quietly as they could, intensely aware of their surroundings and hugging the shadows for safety, knowing that death could be lurking anywhere. When they reached Unter Den Linden, at the opposite end to the Brandenburg Gate, Mulder breathed a sigh of relief. So far so good. Scully led them down a side street and into one of the many ruined buildings along its length.

"You need to stash that Russian gear," she said, as they descended into the cellar.

Mulder took his backpack and the Russian helmet and rifle he was carrying and hid them away in a corner of the cellar, concealing them with some old floorboards. When he took the backpack off, a wallet had fallen out. Scully picked it up.

"You dropped this," she said.

"It's not mine. It belonged to the Russian that Kreuger got the uniform from. Must've fallen out of a pocket. We don't need it. Best throw it away."

"Alexei Denisovich," she said, reading the ID papers within. She then dropped the wallet into the jacket pocket of her blitz madchen uniform. Mulder shrugged, but said nothing. They didn't speak again until they were approaching the security perimeter around the Reich Chancellery.

"So what makes you think we'll get in?" asked Scully. "Neither of us are part of the inner circle

"This has to be April 30th, right?"

"Yes, but what has that...?"

"Hitler is dead. He committed suicide several hours ago. While Kreuger was out lying in wait for a hapless Russian to come by so he could steal his uniform, everything changed at the Chancellery. Before, they were keeping everybody out in order to protect the Fuehrer. Now everyone is planning their escape and just wants to get out. They'll hardly give us a second glance."

It all went just as Mulder said it would. He doubted if the guards would have let just anyone through but Heinrich Kreuger was an SS Sturmbannfuehrer, and while he might not have the extra clearance that would have got him into the Chancellery yesterday, that was more than enough for the guards to let him in today. Mulder told them Scully was his assistant, and they waved her through, too.

"You were right", she said, "but what would you have done if your plan hadn't worked?"

"Then I would have had to try the Jedi mind trick."

"'Jedi mind trick'?"

"I'm pulling your leg, Scully."

The Reich Chancellery had been an impressive building a few years earlier, its huge rooms with their vast slabs of marble and porphyry. enormous doors, and multiple candelabra had witnessed grand parties and triumphal gatherings of the elite of the Third Reich. Now it was a burned and bombed-out shell. A command post was maintained in the ruins, but the real business of the place was now conducted fifty feet below the ground, in the bunker. It was reached via stairs leading down through what had once been the butler's pantry.

Mulder and Scully gingerly made their way down into the bunker proper, both of them alert to the danger of being discovered. This first part of the bunker consisted of a dozen rooms, all of them small, on each side of a central passage. At the other end of the passage, they saw a number of men standing having their picture taken. They were all there, Bormann, Burgdorf, Mohnke, Guensche, Linge, Kempka, and the gigantic Stumpfegger, all save Stumpfegger in uniforms attesting their high status. The man with the camera was Artur Axmann.

"Stop!" Mulder whispered to Scully. "This is the photograph."

She froze and the flash went off. On impulse, as Axmann took his picture, Mulder gave a thumbs up.

"Thank you, gentleman," said Axmann. "Even in the present trying circumstances, we must record what we can for posterity. This is history!"

It certainly was to Mulder and Scully. As they turned to leave they were surrounded by guards. All had their guns pointed at the pair.

"What is the meaning of this?" Mulder demanded, doing his best impression of an outraged Prussian officer.

"Yes, who ordered them detained?" asked Mohnke.

"I did," said Martin Bormann, stepping forward. Dark haired and beetle-browed, Hitler's deputy gazed at them with those oddly inexpressive eyes of his. "These two are enemies of the state. I will deal with them personally."

If the others thought this odd, they kept their opinions to themselves and made no move to intervene. Mulder and Scully were led back to the surface at gunpoint and out into the Chancellery garden. What now, Mulder wondered? Were they going to made to kneel down before each getting a bullet in the back of the head? As soon as any possibility of escape presented itself, Mulder decided he would take it.

"So," said Bormann as they stopped in front of something covered by a tarpaulin, "you were sent back through time to stop me."

The realization hit them both at the same moment: Bormann was the sorcerer! He was speaking in a low voice, obviously not wanting the guards to overhear. But there was a mystery here.

"How did you know who we are?" said Mulder. Bormann should not have known he was anyone other than Heinrich Kreuger.

"Because, Herr Sturmbannfuehrer, someone preceded you and warned me others might be sent to prevent him aiding me. Forewarned is forearmed, so I put spells in place to detect your arrival."

With a theatrical flourish, he pulled the tarpaulin away, to reveal a rock the size of a barrel.

"Behold the runestone!" he said.

It throbbed with barely contained power. The rune cut into its surface was the same rune as on the puzzle box, and it was glowing like a blood red neon sign. The energy in it was held back for now, but it couldn't be for much longer, Mulder was sure. It was like a powerful beast pawing at its cage, and it would have its release. Whatever was happening here was going to happen within the next few minutes. Bormann produced a medal from his pocket.

"This is the Knight's Cross of Adolf Hitler," said Bormann, dropping the ribbon of the medal over his head, "but not the one he was presented with for his services to the Fatherland during the last war. No, I replaced that one with this ten years ago. It's made from a piece of the runestone."

"Why go to all that trouble?" asked Mulder.

"Power. For the past dozen years, Hitler was the focus of the worship of a nation of millions. Yes, worship. He was almost a secular god, something quite new in the world. With all those rallies and the brilliant propaganda, that worship reached feverish levels. Worship, as sorcerers have always known, is a powerful force, but Hitler wouldn't have known how to harness that force for sorcerous ends. He wouldn't even have conceived of the idea. But I did. If Hitler wasn't going to channel those energies, I would. And I did. Into the runestone."

Bormann paused to run his hand lightly over the surface of the stone, a strange intensity in his eyes.

"The runestone was created by a pair powerful sorcerers, a long, long time ago. It's the key to a door, a door which holds back...but, no. You'll be seeing what it was holding back soon enough. After they created the runestone and had succeeded in locking away...what they locked away, neither trusted the other not to use its power for his own ends. So they combined their magic to spirit it away to some random place in the world, expecting it to remain lost forever. It was lost for a very, very long time. But not forever.

In 1934, just outside of Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, USA, a farmer was working one of his fields when his plough struck an object under the soil. It was the runestone, of course. That impact of metal on stone created a spark. An insignificant spark, it's true, but enough to cause a tiny bolt of mystic energy to be emitted by the stone in response. Such a small bolt wouldn't have been detected by anyone who didn't have superbly attuned mystical senses, and not even by such a person if they were more than two or three kilometres away. By an amazing stroke of luck there was such a man in the right place at the right moment, who was also a member of the German-American bund. Not such a stroke of luck for the farmer, who had to be killed of course. I had it smuggled to Germany soon after.

The Knight's Cross was attuned to Hitler alone and couldn't be used by anyone else while he was alive. But he's dead now, and so the Cross passes to me. And if anything goes wrong with what I'm about to do I have a second, even more powerful source of power waiting in the wings."

Mulder didn't like the sound of that, he didn't like it at all. What could Bormann mean?

"I sent a few telegrams out to new Fuehrer Admiral Doenitz to make it appear I'm jockeying for position," said Bormann, "but that was just for show. All that really matters is what's going to happen here. It's a shame the Generals' plot failed. That would've taken Hitler out of the picture earlier and left me with more to work with than what remains of the Third Reich. Still, all is not yet lost. Germany is about to experience a miraculous improvement in its fortunes."

While they couldn't hear what was being said, the four soldiers guarding Mulder and Scully knew something strange was going on and they were by now all looking nervously at the glowing, throbbing runestone and almost ignoring their prisoners. This was their chance.

It was now or never.


	6. Chapter 6

When he saw Scully begin her play, grabbing a gun and scattering the already seriously spooked guards, Mulder leapt for Bormann...only to be stopped in his tracks when a fist the size of a hamhock slammed into the side of his head. The giant had appeared out of nowhere.

"That's right," laughed Bormann, "Ludwig Stumpfegger works for me. Russell Stanton took over his body soon after he arrived at the Chancellery last October. Himmler and that loathsome toad Gebhardt had him sent here as their agent. They wanted him to become the confidant of the Fuehrer and to undermine Himmler's position. They're probably still puzzled they never heard from him again."

Dazed from the blow, and lying on the ground, Mulder looked past the hulking figure of Stumpfegger/Stanton looming over him to see that Scully had a luger. She was firing at Bormann, but it did no good, the bullets bouncing off some sort of energy shield that flared into existence as they got within a foot of him. In fact with the bullets ricocheting back at her, Scully instinctively dropped to the ground. Bormann had both his hands on the runestone, the veins in his temples standing out, his face a mask of determination. He was willing something to happen ...and it was. Slowly but surely, a tall figure was forming out of the air, becoming more and more solid until he finally materialized.

He was tall, easily seven feet, rippling with muscles, and had long red hair and beard. He wore a dark leather tunic of some sort and gauntlets of the same material, but his arms and legs were bare, while his feet were clad with boots of the same white fur as the cape around his shoulders. His helmet was made of gold, as were the bracelets on his arms and the decorative inlay on his tunic. Walking over to the runestone, he raised his fist high above his head, and brought it smashing down on that rock, shattering it, releasing the pent-up mystic energies in all directions. In the rock a hammer had been hidden, one where head and shaft were a seamless whole, made of some strange material that was neither stone nor metal yet looked to be some weird hybrid of the two. Blue fire danced across its surface, the released energies of the runestone now contained within its core. Though he was having difficulty believing what he was seeing, Mulder knew without a doubt who the newcomer had to be when he raised his hammer to the heavens.

"Donar, Lord of the Thunder, God of Storms," said Bormann in ancient Norse, "look about you. The Rus, barbarians from the east, are at the gate. This is your people's hour of need. Deliver them from this scourge!"

Listening to this, Scully was momentarily puzzled. Donar? Then the penny dropped. Of course, the Germanic name for Thor. Pushing herself up into a sitting position, her hand came to rest on something warm. It was a fragment of the runestone, one that held the rune she had seen carved into its surface, though the rune was no longer glowing. On impulse, she stuffed this into her jacket pocket.

Donar was staring expectantly at the Potsdamer Platz, some three hundred yards away. There amid that pile of ruins, the masses of destroyed vehicles, the scorched and twisted skeletons of ambulances with the remains of severed bodies spewing out of them, a thick mist was slowly rising up, strange lights sparkling within. A vast, monstrous presence, unseen but no less awesome for being invisible, seemed to engulf the scene. The besieging Russians, the Nazis in the bunker, and Berliners huddled in their cellars all stopped and held their breath, suddenly chilled to the bone. Something immensely powerful and terrible had just entered the world.

Mulder felt it, too, but unlike those who cast their fearful gaze on the heavens, he was still watching the Potsdamer Platz and so got to see a war chariot emerge from the mist, drawn by two huge white goats easily three times the size of any he'd ever seen before. They leapt into the air, pulling the chariot after them and landing on the Chancellery garden next to Donar. They and the chariot landed light as a feather, and that after a leap of three hundred yards. Only it hadn't been a leap, had it? They had flown. That power of flight was soon confirmed when Donar stepped into the chariot and they took to the skies as if born to that element. Maybe they were. They certainly had greater speed and manouverability than any of the aircraft of this era.

While this was going on, the Russians had surged ahead, pushing through the ragtag assembly of SS guards, U-boat crews, Hitler youth, anti-aircraft troops and policemen who were Berlin's last defenders. Russian T-33 tanks were clanking down Wilhelm Strasse and the Voss Strasse, the bunker itself now in their sights. As Mulder, watched, a bolt of lightning struck the lead tank on Wilhelm Strasse and it exploded in a ball of fire, blocking the way for those behind. It was Donar. In his chariot high overhead, he was shouting words Mulder could not hear, calling down the lightning and directing it with his hammer. And all the while, behind him and all around, was that monstrous presence, filling the world.

The lead tank of the column on the Voss Strasse blew apart, hot metal fragments being thrown hundreds of feet. Now Donar was directing his lightning at the Red Army soldiers, scattering them in all directions, actually driving back their advance as they fled in disarray. Scully chose that moment to pick up a discarded Schmeisser sub machine gun and let fly several rapid bursts at Donar, all of which were intercepted by lightning before they got anywhere near him. He noticed them, though, and swung his hammer in her direction, calling down a lightning bolt. Her world was filled with brilliant light when it struck, and she was thrown to the ground.

Mulder watched in horror as the lightning hit Scully. Nothing human could have survived such an assault.

"No!" he yelled, leaping forward, his head catching Stanton square in the groin. The giant bent forward in pain, and Mulder brought his knee up, slamming it into Stanton's face as hard as he could. It wasn't hard enough. Roaring with pain, blood streaming from his nose, Stanton was still fast enough to grab Mulder around the torso, to get him in a bear hug and then start squeezing with those hugely powerful arms. Caught in that vice-like grip, Mulder felt first one rib crack, and then another. He only had one chance if he wanted to live. Bringing his arms back, he swung them forward as hard as he could, his open palms slamming into the giant's head over each ear, the pressure wave bursting his ear drums. Stanton staggered backwards, dropping Mulder, who immediately pressed his advantage. Picking up one of the discarded rifles, he swung it like a baseball bat, catching his opponent under the chin with the butt. That was the blow that finally did the job, Stanton toppling backwards, hitting the ground with an almighty thud, and lying still. A normal man would have been dead by now, but it was enough that the giant was unconscious and no longer a threat. In a single, fluid motion, Mulder tore the luger from Stanton's holster, turned, and emptied the pistol firing at Bormann. It had no effect. Bormann was still protected by his mystical forcefield and hadn't even noticed the attack, enraptured as he was by the scene overhead and the way Donar was single-handedly driving back the Red Army. Mulder threw the gun aside and ran over to where Scully lay, her clothes smoking. To his amazement, she was still breathing and even seemed to slowly be fighting her way back to consciousness.

Her eyes suddenly snapped open.

"How are you still alive?" he demanded.

Scully pulled the runestone fragment from her pocket. The rune was glowing once again.

"This has to be what saved my life," she said, handing it to him. "I can't imagine what else it could've been."

"Yeah, it must have absorbed the bolt, and it looks like the rune got recharged in the process.

"Mulder, I...omigod!" said Scully, the colour draining from her face at the sight of something behind him.

Slowly he turned. It took a few moments for his mind to fully register what he was seeing. The powerful and terrible entity at Donar's back whose presence everyone in the area had felt could now be seen. Spectral still, his vastness dwarfed everything and he seemed to fill the sky.

"Woden!" whispered Mulder.

There could be no doubt it was he. Woden the Grim, Father of Donar, Lord of the Aesir, the One-Eyed God of Ancient Winter. For the ordinary soldiers of the Red Army this was too overwhelming. Already falling back from Donar's assault, they turned and fled in abject terror at this apparition. Nor were they alone. A large number of those in the bunker were also fleeing, not caring the gods had returned to earth to fight on their behalf.

"We have to stop this!" said Mulder, steely determination in his voice.

"How?" demanded Scully. "Donar is way out of our league as it is, and Woden has to be much, much more powerful."

"We have one weapon in our arsenal," said Mulder. "We have our memories of the footage we've seen from the camps, and we have the rune. If I'm right, we can use it to save everyone's life."

"What do we have to do?"

"Just lay your hand over mine" said Mulder, holding out the hand in which the rune lay.

"Do you know what you're doing, Mulder?" she asked.

"Not really," he admitted, "I'm winging it based on half-remembered fragments of lore from many different books, but this *feels* right."

Scully did as he asked.

"What now?"

"Remember those films from the camps. However much you don't want to, you need to dredge those images from your memory," said Mulder, "and focus them on Woden with all your might. We need to will him to see them."

And so they did. Scully might not believe this would work, but she did believe in Mulder. The concentration needed was intense. Soon she felt herself staggering, spots appearing before her eyes. All that effort seemed to be having no effect.

Until suddenly it did.

The vast spectral figure overhead stopped in it's tracks, momentarily staggered. Then it turned, its terrible gaze alighting on Bormann, on the being who had summoned it to this plane. Mulder smiled. They had got through to him.

"Unclean."

It was a word whispered on the wind.

"Unclean!"

It was a word that made the ruins of Berlin shake.

"UNCLEAN!"

It was a word that filled the world, roared by an angry god with the power to move mountains.

"What just happened?" yelled Scully, straining to be heard above the roar.

"The Aesir are a pantheon of noble warrior gods," Mulder shouted, "summoned to the aid of those who once worshipped them. I thought showing them the evil and depravity of the camps would let them know there's nothing noble about those they were aiding, that they were no longer worthy of such aid. I guessed right."

"Then we've won!" laughed Scully.

She was wrong.


	7. Chapter 7

"Bormann," yelled Scully, "what's he doing now?"

Mulder turned to see, puzzled at first by the items Bormann had hastily withdrawn from a bag near his feet. They looked like a crudely carved child's toy and a torn scrap of cloth bearing... a yellow star? Then it dawned on him. Bormann yelled a single word, the final one needed to complete a complicated spell cast some time before, and tossed the items aside.

"Oh no," said Scully, as Bormann began to grow, the forcefield that had surrounded him blinking out of existence as he switched from his earlier source of power to this new one, "dear God, no."

Bormann continued to grow rapidly as he advanced to face the angry god bearing down on him, his body turning blacker than obsidian, eyes becoming like molten lava as he topped a hundred feet, still growing.

"Since coming to this time I'd wondered what Bormann's agents were up to in the camps," said a voice, "what possible interest he could have in those places. Now I know."

It was Stanton, up on one elbow where he lay, wiping blood from his nose with his free hand.

"He was turning them into temples," he continued.

"Temples?" said Mulder, uncomprehendingly.

"You can't make a temple of a battlefield but you can make one of a camp," said Stanton. "Ironically, the Jews would understand the concept. They have something called an eruv, a similar mystic principle was used to make the camp fences the defining walls of temples. And where you have a temple you can harvest any sacrifices that occur within it. The Nazis were killing millions upon millions, representing a vast amount of necromantic energy that otherwise would have gone to waste. Bormann made the ovens into altars, every death another blood sacrifice, another power boost. Can you imagine the power he now wields, the power of millions of murdered souls? With such power you can bring down the gods themselves."

"Sympathetic magic," Mulder said to Scully, "the doll and the cloth provided the link, and now the bridge has been made all that power is flowing into Bormann."

"A doll and a scrap of cloth?" she replied. "I don't understand."

"The doll was probably fashioned from a stray piece of wood by a father for his child, the cloth with the star on torn from the clothing of a murdered Jew. They're items from the camps, Scully."

The ground shook, and they all looked up fearfully. Bormann was now equal in size to Woden and engaging him in physical struggle. Woden still looked spectral - you could still see through him - but he was solid enough to grapple with Bormann. Donar was way up there in the sky, chariot darting here and there as he rained lightning bolts down on Bormann. He was as ineffectual as a fly. As they watched, Bormann swatted him aside like one. Thrown from his chariot, Donar hurtled to the ground, creating a crater where he hit and showering those watching with dirt. He lay very, very still. Overhead, impossible as it seemed, Woden was slowly being driven back. Bormann was winning.

"There's something I don't understand," Mulder said, as they were showered with debris from another direction, the result of Bormann bringing down several wrecked buildings as he shifted one of his enormous feet slightly.

"What's that?" said Scully, leaping clear of a shower of falling bricks.

"From what I understand of such matters, the doll and the cloth are enough to make a sympathetic link but not to sustain it. To channel the levels of power Bormann is wielding requires a significant mystical device, and it would need to be close by, but there's nothing here."

Stanton, still lying prone, looked smug, as if they were missing something obvious. Then Scully had it.

"Mulder, the doll!" she said.

"NO!" yelled Stanton. It shouldn't have been enough to get Bormann's attention, but it was. That great, obsidian giant briefly turned his flaming gaze upon them. As he did so a strange howling filled the air. Ghostly forms materialized around them, a great sea of wraiths, falling over them and each other. They were surrounded by countless thousands of skeletal, sunken-eyed people. Sallow-skinned and unblinking, all of them had their gaze fixed on the trio, moving forward, ghostly hands clawing at the living, screaming as they dragged them down, imploring them and smothering them with their desperation and their need as they overwhelmed the three with their sheer numbers. It was a nightmare given form by Bormann. They found themselves the focus for the pain of a million murdered souls, whose despair threatened to drop them where we stood.

"Please, don't...I can't...I..." cried Scully, tears streaming down her face as she tried to move forward. Her legs seemed made of lead. Each step taking an eternity. Then she stumbled, falling to her knees. She pressed her hands to her ears, vainly trying to block out the terrible cries of the tormented. Mulder was crawling forward some yards behind, his face a mask of anguish, while Stanton was curled into a foetal ball, hands over his ears, pleading for it to stop. It was up to her, Scully realised. She had to succeed.

Crawling, she groped my way forwards, getting ever closer to where the doll lay. Even through the babel around her, Scully sensed something was coming up behind her. She turned, and there was Donar, now the same obsidian colour as Bormann, with the same burning eyes, striding towards her, treating the screaming wraiths as if they weren't there.

"No, goddammit, no!" she shouted, screaming her defiance against the despair, somehow forcing herself to make that final lunge and close her hand around the doll before Donar reached her. She slammed it down on a brick with all her strength, the wood cracking apart to reveal a glowing, pulsing gemstone. _This_ was what was maintaining the link.

She saw the shadow first. It was Donar, looming over her, hammer drawn back and preparing to strike a blow she could not survive. Only the hammer never descended. First the blue flame started to dance around the head of Donar's hammer, pushing back the darkness, revealing the hammer in its true glory, then it continued along his arm, driving the darkness out of his hammer arm completely. Donar roared, grabbing the wrist of the hand holding the hammer with his other, still-dark hand, trying to force it to descend. It could only be Woden, Scully realised, diverting what little of his strength he could spare in order to aid her. The way his battle with Bormann was going, that aid couldn't last long, but it would be enough.

Struggling to her knees, she pulled the runestone fragment from her pocket once more and brought the glowing rune down on that pulsating gemstone with all her fading strength. She struck true.

The gemstone shattered, sending a laser-like beam of energy into the sky, the clouds parting before it as it pierced the heavens. Into that beam were sucked all the wraiths. And Bormann's power. It was pulled from him in a single dark stream, his form shrinking as it flowed from him and into the beam pouring from the gemstone.

"NO!" he screamed, but it was no longer the voice of a man become a god but that of a god rapidly becoming a man again.

When all the wraiths had been pulled into the beam, the darkness drawn from Donar, and the final vestiges of power sucked from Bormann, the gemstone beam shut off as abruptly as it had started. As the last of the wraiths vanished Scully thought she heard a voice whisper "Danke", but that may just have been her imagination.

Bormann was floating in the air directly in front of Woden's face, Stanton floating beside him, their bodies as stiff as mannequins. He stared at them, expression like thunder, then he opened his mouth, and sucked their souls from their bodies. They had time for a single sharp scream, then it was done. Their bodies were lost to sight when they floated gently to ground some streets distant from Mulder and Scully.

"May I help you up?" came a voice that was the most manly Scully had ever heard. She looked up. Donar was offering her his hand, a smile on that handsome, chiselled face. She took the hand and he helped her up. Standing next to him, she gulped. He was like some Platonic, idealized version of what a man should be, some perfect representation of distilled maleness. Scully felt strange stirrings in her chest and groin, and found her heart was racing and her breathing getting shallower. Flustered, she backed away.

"Mulder," she said, "How is Mulder?"

"I'm OK, Scully," came his voice from behind her. He was climbing to his feet, and looked both shaken by his ordeal and chagrined that she had succeeded where he had not.

"How did you know the gemstone was hidden in the doll?" he asked.

"I didn't, not exactly. There was just something about how smug Stanton looked that made me think we were missing something obvious, something hidden in plain sight. Then I thought about how the forcefield around Bormann vanished when he switched from one source of power to another, how he would have expected this and known any device for maintaining the link to that second source of power would then be visible and vulnerable. He was counting on us assuming anything he so casually tossed aside as he did the doll and the cloth must have served its purpose and be of no further use or interest to him. He was relying on subterfuge, and it almost worked."

Mulder was impressed, though a bit mortified that Scully had both figured this out and succeeded where he had started to buckle under the pressure. He looked around him, noticing for the first time how totally, eerily quiet it was. Then he saw the fleeing Russians in the distance, frozen in mid-stride, the rat a few feet away, suspended in the air in mid leap as it skittered through the rubble. Time had stopped. Only he, Scully, and Donar were still moving. Overhead, the architect of this miracle gazed down impassively, single huge eye focussed on them, a dark unfathomable void where the other should be.

"I can see the stars through him," thought Mulder, the grim god looking as spectral as ever.

"What is to be done about the Germans?" said Donar. "The abomination they have created demands the justice of the gods."

"No," said Scully, firmly. "Their crimes were crimes against humanity and it's for humanity to judge them. I know how this looks now, and the monstrousness of what was done in their name will forever leave an ineradicable stain on the soul of the nation, but the next generation will build a German state that finally abides by the democratic norms of the civilized nations of the world. They will be at the heart of a Europe that in my time it is almost impossible to imagine tearing itself apart as it has twice in the past thirty years. Give them that chance."

Watching Scully, noting her body language as she stood next to Donar, the way she kept stealing glances at his face and flushing, Mulder realized she was attracted to him. He smiled. Then Donar spoke.

"It shall be as you wish, milady Scully," he said. "When you sent the telepathic message showing Lord Woden that evil, you unknowingly also gave him access to all your memories. He knows what the future should look like, and this affair will not change that."

"But how?" she said.

"Woden has stopped time in this city. When it restarts, none will remember that we were ever here. Those who were killed will remain dead, but the minds of the living will fill in any details required to explain how they died. The time of the Aesir has passed. We should not have been summoned, and will walk this world no more."

So saying, he placed his hammer head down on the ground amid the shattered remains of the runestone. As soon as he released his grip on it, all the scattered fragments flew towards it. Like a movie run backwards, the runestone swiftly reassembled until it was as they had seen it earlier, not a crack to be seen. He turned once more to Scully.

"Bury the stone and it will both return you to your own era and start time flowing once again in this city."

So saying he lifted Scully's hand and kissed it, which struck Mulder as an oddly courtly gesture for a supposedly barbarian god. Donar gave a huge grin, saluted them, and he and Woden faded away as if they had never been there. Scully stood stock still, looking stunned, until Mulder said:

"I need to get to that cellar before time restarts and we go home. It's where Kreuger said he woke."

"Hmmm?" said Scully slowly, as if coming out from under a spell. "Oh. Yes, of course. But you'd better hurry. I'll start burying the stone now, but I won't finish until you're clear."

"OK," said Mulder, setting off. "Then I guess I'll see you fifty years from now, Scully."


	8. Chapter 8

THE MADDOW MANSION,  
>MARYLAND.<p>

Sitting in the rear of the chauffer driven limo, Mulder was rereading Hugh Trevor-Roper's 'The Last Days of Hitler'. It was the definitive work on his final days. Originally published in 1947, it had been modified slightly in later years as more information subsequently became available. In the preface to the 1978 edition, he found the following:

"In 1946 I recorded the evidence of Artur Axmann who stated that he had seen the bodies of Bormann and Stumpfegger lying in the Invalidenstrasse near the Lerter station...In December 1972, in the course of building operations in the same place, two bodies were accidentally dug up which the German authorities have declared, after forensic tests, to be those of Bormann and Stumpfegger...Dr Reidar , a US dental surgeon who has specialized in such identification, and has used the surviving dental records of Bormann's (and Hitler's) dentist, Professor Hugo Blaschke, is satisfied the shorter of the two bodies has been correctly identified as that of Bormann. Thus Axmann's evidence is at last independently confirmed, at least in its essentials. Only in one inessential detail does it need to be modified. Seeing no wounds, Axmann assumed that Bormann and Stumpfegger had been shot in the back. The German authorities concluded that, despairing of escape, they had taken poison."

That seemed a reasonable assumption on their part to Mulder, given they only had bones to work with and there was no forensic test for determining whether the soul has been sucked from the body and consumed by an angry god. He closed Trevor-Roper's book and picked up the other he had brought with him. This contained photographs of the fall of Berlin. The photo on the cover was the famous picture of a Russian soldier raising the red flag atop the burned out shell of the Reichstag. Mulder now recognised that soldier as Heinrich Kreuger.

When he and Scully had awoken back in the Maddow mansion and back in their own bodies, they had found a teary-eyed Susan Maddow awaiting them. Russell Stanton was dead, she told them. He had died while they were gone. Of course he had. If his soul had been eaten in the past, how could his body carry on living in the present? That had been two months ago. Only now, following the funeral, and a period of grieving, had Susan Maddow felt up to seeing Mulder again.

When they arrived at the mansion, a butler led Mulder through to the drawing room where Susan Maddow was seated on a couch, awaiting him.

"Good morning, Agent Mulder," she said, rising to greet him, "I imagine you've spent much of the past two months formulating the questions you want to ask me about you experience?"

"Something like that, yes," he said, taking a seat.

Susan had a maid bring them tea.

"I'm surprised you didn't bring Agent Scully with you," she said.

"Dana's in denial about the whole thing, I'm afraid," said Mulder. "She's convinced herself that what happened to us wasn't real, that it was some sort of fever dream. Right after we got back, she took blood samples from us both and among the substances injected into us by the puzzle box she found a powerful hallucinogen. That clinched it for her. She believes our joint experience to be a tale you fed to us for reasons of your own while we drugged and suggestible. It's really easy to plant false memories, as the 'ritual satanic child abuse' panic of the last decade proved, so it's certainly a plausible explanation. In Berlin, Scully found a wallet belonging to a Red Army soldier named Alexei Denisovich, but even discovering he was real after we got back wasn't enough."

"What a pity. To have saved the world but not to believe it. Do you have any such doubts?"

"No, I _know_ what happened to us was real. I have proof."

"Really?" said Susan, intrigued. "Do tell."

"It's the photo Artur Axmann took that had Heinrich Kreuger and Eva Schreiber in the background. In the original, Kreuger's hands are out of sight, but when it was taken of us I gave a thumbs up. When we got back I checked the photo. It has the thumbs up."

"But, it always did," she said, frowning.

"No, that's how you remember it because what I did changed things. It's now always been that way. Scully and I are the only two who remember it differently, and she's decided her memory must be wrong, that it's a trivial detail she just misremembered."

"But it's not trivial at all, is it?"

"No, it proves that the past can be changed and that the fate of the world truly was at stake. Your grandson really could have changed everything."

"Poor Russell. What happened to him is all my fault."

"Not everything. Becoming a Nazi was his own choice. I'm assuming you told him all about your own experiences in Berlin?"

"Then you know?"

"That you used to be Eva Schreiber? Yes. It wasn't difficult to find out when I went looking."

"I suppose not. I may not have broadcast it, but neither is it something I've ever actively tried to conceal. When I met Grant, my late husband, he was a handsome young Major in the US Army, and very dashing. He was among the first Americans to reach Berlin. When we married I changed my name to Susan and had voice lessons to lose my German accent. After the horrors I'd witnessed, all the experiences I'd had, I wanted to make a fresh start."

"I understand. And the puzzle box? You went back to 1945 with your grandson, didn't you?"

"How...?"

"The box takes two to open, and you could only have known for sure that Russell's mind had been sent to the past if you'd also experienced it. You have to have been the other person when he opened it. I'm guessing you got stabbed, too."

She rolled her sleeve up to reveal the mark on her wrist.

"It was dark," she said, a haunted look in her eyes, "but from the sounds and smells I knew exactly where I was. It was somewhere I'd had nightmares about for years. I was back in that cellar, _the_ cellar, surrounded by the bodies of my friends. In a frenzy, I clawed my way out of the rubble, not even thinking about the fact that I was back in my 19 year-old body once again. When I emerged I saw him, Heinrich Kreuger, a face I recognised from his OSS photo. I thought at first he might be Russell, but it soon became obvious he wasn't. We hadn't gone very far together when I felt myself being pushed out of my body by someone else and woke up back here. Russell was still under so I knew he was still back there...somewhere."

"And somewhen," said Mulder. "For some reason he arrived back there a lot earlier than you did. I'm guessing it was being pushed out of your body like that which clued you in that someone else had gone back to 1945, or would be doing so very soon."

"Yes. When Dana displaced me our minds touched briefly and I caught a single name: Fox Mulder."

"Which is why you looked me up and sought me out."

"Actually, I already knew of you from Arthur Dales. He speaks very highly of you."

"And you believe my report?"

"In my time with the OSS I saw too many strange things to easily dismiss it. But this is one X-file that can't be filed with the others."

"I understand."

"I'd always wondered what had happened to me back then. I remembered being in that cellar when the bombs were falling, then the next thing I knew I was waking up in the Reich Chancellery garden, next to a patch of freshly dug ground. Now, thanks to you and Agent Scully, I know what happened. But...gods. Do you really think you encountered gods?"

"I believe that we are not alone in the universe. If there are other intelligent beings out there, it follows that some of them may be far, far in advance of us, and so alien that it might be difficult for us to see them as they really are. If their first contact with our species was with our ancestors they may very well have been thought of as gods, and been perceived in those terms. Who's to say they wouldn't have gone along with that perception, to have played into it in order for communication to be possible. But that isn't what concerns me about this case."

"No? Then what is?"

"I believe in free will and always had a problem with predestination, so this case is troubling in that regard."

"How so?"

"You and your husband kept the puzzle box, but you're unable to explain why. As a result it was conveniently available to your grandson when he discovered the significance of the rune. It was also available to enable Scully and me to follow him back to 1945. Once there, we stopped Bormann from giving the Third Reich victory. Except that it had never had that victory in the first place. We stopped it because we always had stopped it. Before we were even born, we were part of the events back then."

"Maybe. But what if Agent Scully is right, and none of it really happened? I mean, think about it. When the barbs shoot out of the puzzle box and stab us both, Russell tells me he's a Nazi and this will unlock the past, that his mind will be transported back to 1945 and into the body of someone in that time so he can change the outcome of the war. I've just been injected with a powerful hallucinogen and this is the last thing I hear before slipping under. Why wouldn't I then imagine myself back in that cellar in 1945? And as for Heinrich Kreuger, I'd seen photos of him in the file I gave you so I could have plucked him from my memory as part of the hallucination. For some reason, I recover from the hallucination quickly, but as consciousness is returning a name Arthur Dales told me pops up from my memory: Fox Mulder. By then giving you and Agent Scully the file and telling you what I did, I inadvertently prime you both the same way Russell primed me. As the hallucinogen takes hold, where else are you going to apparently find yourself but back in Berlin in 1945? Your own imaginations then provide everything else. As for your thumbs up, I'm afraid that proves nothing since, as Agent Scully says, you may have only imagined the photo was once different. Let's face it; without something solid to prove otherwise, this is the most logical explanation for our experiences. You need hard evidence to prove it all happened, something tangible, and you don't have it."

"No," admitted Mulder, "I don't. Six weeks ago I took a flight to Berlin, hoping to find the runestone."

"And did you?"

"No, I'm afraid not. Since I last visited three years ago, they've started clearing the ground, but there was no sign of it. Nor had anyone found a large rock with a rune carved into it during their digging."

"Then however you and I might wish otherwise, perhaps it was never there in the first place."

"""""""""""""""""""""""

EPILOGUE:  
>SEVEN WEEKS EARLIER<p>

The truck that pulled into Hangar 51 was weather-beaten and nondescript on the outside, but beneath its carefully 'distressed' surface lay a state of the art armoured vehicle more secure and impregnable than any commercially available equivalent. But then it was designed to carry cargo for more valuable - and dangerous - than mere bullion or diamonds. It was carrying one such item now, a large rock unearthed from what had once been the garden of Hitler's chancellery by American military personnel masquerading as building workers. They had taken it to Ramstein air base, and a military transport had flown it to a secret location in the USA where it was boxed and loaded into the truck for the final leg of its journey.

The Colonel in charge of the operation was there when the crate was unloaded from the truck, the letters 'OSS' freshly stencilled on its side. He nodded approvingly when a forklift picked it up and carried it deep into the hangar to join the thousands of other items crated up and stored here by Uncle Sam. Susan Maddow had done well in directing them to the spot where the rock was buried. It was good to know that if it ever got involved in an occult war, among the many items America could deploy was the hammer of Thor.

""""""""""""""""

THE END

""""""""""""""""

_Notes: _

_With the exception of Heinrich Kreuger and Eva Schreiber, all the Germans named in the story were real people. My primary source for the historical background in this tale was H. -Roper's THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER (1947, MacMillan & Co., 1978 revision, ISBN 0 330 10129 3). I also used Douglas Botting's IN THE RUINS OF THE REICH (1985, George Allen & Unwin ISBN, 0 04 943036) for additional detail. _

_I used Hangar 51 in the epilogue since I've always seen Indiana Jones as existing in the same universe as the X-Files, and I like the idea of the runestone being hidden away alongside the Ark of the Covenant. _

_Finally, is this the sort of tale people here have any interest in reading? Clearly, 'shipping' tales are the most popular, but is there room for the type of plot-heavy stories I like writing? Without any feedback I can't tell if I just wrote this one for myself. _


End file.
